Long Walk Home

Long walk home – For the past five years, Robbie Lawrence has travelled throughout Scotland and the United States photographing the Highland Games. His highly anticipated new book Long Walk Home examines the cultural significance of the traditional community tournament and questions the very notion of what it is to be from a place.

Presented as a limited edition double-volume publication, including a hardback book of candid images of the Games, and a second Singer-sewn volume of portraits of the Games participants, alongside an extended text by award-winning poet John Burnside, which teases apart the threads of how Scots and the Scottish diaspora have remoulded the form of the Games to suit their cultural needs. Burnside passed away shortly after completing his beautiful text.

“We do not need to be born in a place – we do not even need to have seen it – to enter into its mythology, because myths are not historical. Myths are elective – not at the level of consciousness, not as an informed, self-aware choice, but as the expression of something more fundamental and, at the same time, more lyrical. History is what sets us in our place, binding us to social norms and conventions and limits; myths let us roam, they make space for the imagination, for re-invention, for a sense of belonging that is not conferred by a clan name, or a verified birth certificate – and by now, in much of the world, including Scotland, Scottishness is as much myth as it is history, which means that we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully and, more than anything else, love it wisely.” – John Burnside